Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or simply drones, have been designed, built, and flown for decades. No longer strictly limited to recreational users, such as radio-controlled model airplane enthusiasts who send miniscule replicas of World War II fighter aircraft airborne, nor to reconnaissance experts working for clandestine arms of the government who construct and build flying platforms that are packed with sensors and electronics and capable of being remotely piloted from a control station a hemisphere away, the use of UAVs is expanding rapidly into commercial applications as well.
Relatively recently, a prominent American businessman envisioned a world where UAVs can deliver consumer items to a customer's doorstep within thirty minutes of being ordered online. While this vision may yet be some years from being realized, UAVs have already been used in applications related to wildfire mapping, disaster management, thermal infrared power line surveys, telecommunications, weather monitoring, aerial imaging/mapping, television news coverage, sporting events, moviemaking, environmental monitoring, and oil and gas exploration. It is safe to say that the growth of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) that utilize UAVs is expected to grow exponentially. Indeed, global annual spending on research, development, testing, and evaluation of UAS was about 6.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2013 and is expected to grow to 11.4 billion by 2022.
While the growing proliferation of UAS has the potential to transform human life and bring us one step closer to a society straight from a science fiction novel, there are a host of unresolved issues lurking behind this growth, perhaps the biggest one being public safety. For example, since existing UAS are managed remotely and rely upon wireless signals to receive operational commands, a UAS can be hacked and its mission bent to destructive purposes. In 2012, a University of Texas professor and a group of students demonstrated this weakness by intercepting a Global Positioning System (GPS) guided UAS, using a OPS device that they created.
Integrating UAS safely into national airspace also represents a nightmare for the entities responsible for control and safety of the National Aerospace System (NAS). In March of 2014, a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) administrative law judge overturned the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) first-ever fine against a drone operator, ruling that when the operator flew an unmanned drone over the University of Virginia in 2011, “there was no enforceable FAA rule or FAR (Federal Aviation Regulation) applicable to model aircraft or for classifying model aircraft as an UAS.”
The U.S. Congress has asked the FAA to formulate a plan for safe integration of UAS into commerce by the fall of 2015. Meanwhile, the FAA has officially stated on their website that anyone who wants to fly an aircraft—manned or unmanned—in U.S. airspace needs some level of FAA approval. In the regulatory vacuum that currently exists, there is a need for UAS and methods of operating UAS that are both safe to the public and stand a good chance of avoiding the strict regulatory oversight that appears likely to be introduced by the FAA in the near future.